Here’s our collection of books, articles, papers, podcasts and more that we think have great things to say about equity in data.

Anand Giridharadas on Recode Decode with Kara Swisher: Giridharadas characterized the power of Zuckerberg and his peers in policy discussions as the result of a “40-year war on the idea of government.” Why should they be treated as sagacious experts when they come from a completely different arena?

Yarning about yarning: is a paper that demonstrates the credibility and rigor of yarning, an Indigenous cultural form of conversation, through its use as a data gathering tool with two different Indigenous groups, one in Australia and the second in Botswana.

Equitable Evaluation Framing Paper: is a product of the Equitable Evaluation Project (now the Equitable Evaluation Initiative) and was published in July 2017. The EEI Team believes that shifts in evaluation purpose and practice do not solely rest in philanthropy but among evaluators and nonprofits as well. Although this paper touches on those points briefly there is additional research and writing forthcoming to explore them more explicitly. This paper was co-authored by Center for Evaluation Innovation, Institute for Foundation and Donor Learning, Dorothy A Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Luminare Group.

Accounting for Slavery: A unique contribution to the decades-long effort to understand New World slavery’s complex relationship with capitalism. Through careful analysis of plantation records, Caitlin Rosenthal explores the development of quantitative management practices on West Indian and Southern plantations. She shows how planter-capitalists built sophisticated organizational structures and even practiced an early form of scientific management.

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect: explores the center of scientific inquiry, and yet for decades scientists had no way of answering simple questions, such as whether smoking causes cancer. In The Book of Why, Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie show how Pearl’s work on causality has broken through this stalemate, unleashing a revolution in our knowledge of the world.

Feminism Counts: provides a unique overview of contemporary quantitative approaches to gender research. The research includes explorations of heterosexual and same sex violence, media responses to feminist research, data sources for the study of equalities, approaches for analysing global and local demographic change and intersectional concerns in respect of work and employment.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism: explores data discrimination as a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Weapons of Math Destruction is one of the preeminent books addressing the algorithms that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by machines. Cathy O’Neil reveals the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong.

This Is Not an Atlas: gathers more than forty counter-cartographies from all over the world. This collection shows how maps are created and transformed as a part of political struggle, for critical research, or in art and education; from indigenous territories in the Amazon to the anti-eviction movement in San Francisco; from defending commons in Mexico to mapping refugee camps with balloons in Lebanon; from slums in Nairobi to squats in Berlin.

White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology: is a collection of essays that examine how racial considerations have affected the way social science is conducted; how issues are framed, and data is analyzed. With an assemblage of leading scholars, White Logic, White Methods explores the possibilities and necessary dethroning of current social research practices, and demands a complete overhaul of current methods.

Elements of Indigenous Style: offers Indigenous writers and editors–and everyone creating works about Indigenous Peoples–the first published guide to common questions and issues of style and process. Everyone working in words or other media needs to read this important new reference, and to keep it nearby while they’re working.

Decolonizing Methodologies: is an essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research – specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as ‘regimes of truth.’ Concepts such as ‘discovery’ and ‘claiming’ are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Indigenous Research Methodologies: is a response to increased emphasis in the classroom and the field on exposing students to diverse epistemologies, methods, and methodologies. that situates research in a larger, historical, cultural, and global.

Applying Indigenous Research Methods: focuseson the question of how Indigenous Research Methodologies can be used and taught across Indigenous studies and education. In this collection, Indigenous scholars address the importance of IRMs in their own scholarship, while focusing conversations on the application withothers. Each chapter is co-authored to model methods rooted in the sharing of stories to strengthen relationships, such as yarning, storywork, and others.

Indigenous Statistics: is the first book ever published of its kind. Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen open up a major new approach to research across the disciplines and applied fields. The population statistics relied on by virtually all research on Indigenous peoples continue to be taken for granted as straightforward, transparent numbers. This book dismantles that persistent positivism with a forceful critique, then fills the void with a new paradigm for Indigenous quantitative methods.

Other, Please Specify: is a showcase of the work of emerging and established sociologists in the fields of sexuality and gender studies as they reflect on what it means to develop, practice, and teach queer methods. Located within the critical conversation about the possibilities and challenges of utilizing insights from humanistic queer epistemologies in social scientific research.

Just Research in Contentious Times: widens the methodological imagination for students, educators, scholars, and researchers interested in crafting research with communities. Fine shares her struggles over the course of 30 years to translate research into policy and practice that can enhance the human condition and create a more just world.

Automating Inequality: Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.